Monday, October 31, 2016

Here, in no particular order, are some of the top takeaways
from the speakers or discussions at the National IPM Coordinating Committee
meeting in October in Washington, D.C.

Public health, sustainable agriculture and invasive species
are challenges worldwide, and IPM is critical to addressing all of them.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is trying to slow
the development of resistance by including more resistance-management
information on pesticide labels, and issuing non-binding guidance about product
use and training to increase resistance management.

To expand adoption of IPM, it’s necessary to show obvious
economic benefits.

The appeal and understanding of IPM needs to extend beyond
insects.

The most effective way to advocate – for IPM or anything - is
with one voice.

IPM needs a unified message and meaningful common measures
to document its impact.

In developing a unified voice or vision, focus on issues where
people already broadly agree instead of the areas where they disagree.

It’s easier to advocate for fewer, larger budget lines that
collapse several programs into a single line-item, but then agency
implementation of those programs becomes critical.

What's next for IPM? What should it look like in the future? How should it be funded? Whom should it serve? If you had a blank slate, how would you create a new IPM to best benefit the people, environment and economy of the United States? That's what the National IPM Coordinating Committee spent a good portion of its two-day meeting in October discussing. And you can contribute to the conversation.

In workshops, meeting participants answered questions
the Committee will use to draft a white paper proposing a future
direction for IPM. Here are the questions participants answered:

What are the BIG ideas for a NEW IPM?

You have a clean white board with
the full authority and financial support to create a NEW IPM. What are three key
concepts to evolve the current paradigm?

Local, state and regional IPM needs
exist. How would you go about identifying and linking these needs to national
priorities?

How would you programmatically
address underserved populations or program areas?

How would you create the next
generation of IPM professionals?

Consider the food-production needs
to feed the world population by 2050. How can land grant universities best
support the IPM needs of the global community?

There were also workshop questions about
communication and accountability:

How should local, state, regional
and national needs assessments be determined?

What is the best way to coordinate
IPM on a national basis?

What is the system infrastructure
needed to best develop and deliver IPM?

How can we better capture and
package IPM stories?

How should state impacts be
communicated at the national level?

Excluding time and funding, what are
the barriers to effective communication and accountability?

They say people hate change. And while change can be scary
and stressful, it can also be transformative and even adventurous.

Integrated pest management is all about change. IPM is is a
system of change – where you make the best decision you can, evaluate that
decision and then make more changes. That’s what makes IPM such a fun system to
work with: it’s a tool that can be applied in different ways and in different
settings and while the principles remain constant, the practice of IPM doesn’t.

One person wondered if we could frame IPM as an approach
within other contexts, a framework incorporated into other pest management
contexts and systems. That didn’t seem like a change to me until she suggested
that to fit in some systems, we might have to give up the term IPM. That’s a
big change and that’s one that initially made me uncomfortable. Are we ready,
as a community, to give up this name that we worked so long and hard to define?

But would we actually be giving up anything if our ultimate
vision was still fulfilled? If the principles of integrated pest management are
applied across systems and the result is increased income, a more resilient
environment and a healthier population, have we lost anything?

I certainly think it’s worth having the discussion. You can
contribute to the National IPM Coordinating Committee white paper, but you can
also contribute by having these conversations within your networks in and out
of the IPM community. What would it take to see IPM used in every school,
national park, forest, house and farm in the West?

The National IPM Coordinating Committee isn’t the only place
where this discussion is being held. We are holding it at the Center, too.

As I’ve been learning about the Center, I’ve asked our team
to be introspective. As a result, we have refined our mission and vision and
developed a draft of how we will evaluate ourselves and hold ourselves
accountable to the people of the West.

Our new mission statement outlines why we exist:

We serve the people, environment and economy of the West by
supporting the development and adoption of integrated pest management to reduce
the risks of pests and of pest-management practices.

And we’ve developed a new vision that outlines what we would
like to see as a result of our efforts:

A healthier West with fewer pests.

We’ve developed a theory of change around these revised
goals. This theory of change summarizes our work at a strategic level. It’s
meant to motivate us and locate us in the greater IPM community. It begins with
our ultimate goal.

A healthy West is one where human health is improved or
protected, the environment, communities and farms become more resilient and the
economy is enriched.

To us, the path to a healthier West is through widespread
IPM adoption. Along with others, the Western IPM Center aims to increase IPM
adoption. With our resources and expertise, the Center’s niche is building
regional approaches to integrated pest management. State-level IPM researchers,
extension educators, growers, agencies and others develop, test and refine IPM
methodologies that work on local scales. We promote and catalyze the expansion
of these methodologies beyond state and regional borders. We also support our
region by promoting its needs at a national level.

The Western IPM Center will use this theory of change to
plan and evaluate our program. This theory of change is flexible and responsive
to change. And it might be modified from time to time because, as we all know,
things change.I look forward to your thoughts on reframing integrated pest management, our vision and
mission statements, and our theory of change. Together, as a community, we can
change the way people manage pests. We can integrate IPM principles into other
systems. And we can work together for a healthier West with fewer pests.

Saturday, October 29, 2016

One of the most effective tools to influence federal
regulatory decisions about pesticides is an up-to-date Pest Management
Strategic Plan.

That was the message from representatives of the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture’s Office of
Pest Management Policy – the federal agencies that most use PMSPs – during a
recent meeting of the four Regional IPM Centers in Washington, D.C.

The session was held to ask the agencies how they used the
documents, and update them on two initiatives to improve PMSPs. And the clear
message from the regulators was that there are few pieces of information more
valuable to them as they consider new restrictions than a pest management strategic
plan.

PMSPs are developed by groups representing growers,
commodity associations, researchers, crop consultants and others to document
current pest-management issues and practices in a particular crop and set
priorities for research, regulation and education. The Western IPM Center funds
the creation of PMSPs, and our current request for applications contains a
category specifically for developing or updating PMSPs and crop profiles. (Applications
are due December 9; download the RFA.)

The information in PMSPs most valuable to regulators show
the actual amounts of a pesticide used, and when and how it’s used. Here’s why:

Without actual usage information, the agencies’
risk models assume the product is used at its maximum allowed level, which isn’t
always the case.

Knowing how and when a product is used and
applied on a particular crop helps the agencies craft restrictions – or avoid
restrictions – that preserve critical uses of the pesticide while mitigating
unacceptable risks. For example, if a product is not applied while a crop is
blooming, EPA doesn’t need to craft restrictions to protect pollinators. But
without that actual usage information, the agency would likely propose
pollinator-protection restrictions, simply assuming they were needed.

The agencies offered another very valuable piece of advice:
If there’s a chemical coming up for registration review that’s critical to a
crop, commodity or pest-management program, getting a PMSP done ahead of time
is a very good idea. EPA’s registration schedule can be found here.

Improving the PMSP
Process

There are two initiatives under way to improve the process
of creating, updating and using PMSPs. The first is an ongoing effort of the
Regional IPM Centers, led by the Southern IPM Center, to build a database of
all the elements contained in PMSPs.

The database is designed to make PMSPs easier to create, by
importing pest, pesticide and other information from existing databases, and
easier to update by allowing changes to be noted as they occur. If a new pest
emerges, for instance, the PMSP can document that concern quickly, and newer
and older versions can be compared easily, showing IPM improvements in a crop’s
management as well as challenges. The Western IPM Center’s recent comparison of hops PMSPs, for example, showed significant improvements in some IPM practices
in that crop.

The other new PMSP development is an effort led by Katie
Murray at the Integrated Plant Protection Center at Oregon State University to
develop and pilot an Integrated Pest Management Strategic Plan. These IPMSPs,
as they’re known, would better incorporate IPM elements in the PMSP process,
and use the survey methods developed in the Crop Pest-Loss and Impact Assessment Signature Program to enhance the reports.

Recently funded, Murray’s group will develop IPMSPs for four
Pacific Northwest crops, beginning with onions, and followed by cranberries, hazelnuts
and cherries.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Twenty years ago, I lived in Germany. I recently re-read
some of the first letters I wrote describing my new home. In them, I pointed
out everything that was different – from the way windows open to the lack of roadside
billboards. But as time went on, I stopped noticing the differences and would
only see them again when people came to visit and I could experience the
country anew through their eyes.

I’ve incorporated that lesson at work. When I hire people,
my first advice to them is to write down everything that seems unexpected or
unusual, because through fresh eyes we can see our operation in a new
perspective. And there is usually something valuable in what they see and say
that veterans in the organization overlook or take for granted.

I’ve been heeding my own advice as I’ve reacquainted myself
with integrated pest management activities and needs in the West. I’ve called
and met and talked with stakeholders throughout the region, and have been
listening and noting what seems unusual. And what stands out is something that
doesn’t show up in my notes as often as I expected: areawide IPM.

To me, integrated pest management solutions are rooted in
ecosystem-level approaches. This was always clear when I worked in forest
pathology, and as I listen to others, I see that some of the most successful ecosystem-level
examples of integrated pest management have been ones of areawide cooperation.

Pests don’t have borders. It simply makes sense that IPM
shouldn’t stop at borders either, whether that border is at a field or forest,
or at a backyard fence or state line.

In Montana, wheat streak mosaic virus is best controlled
when every farmer eliminates the green
bridge, live plants that allow the mite that spreads the disease to survive
and move downwind to other fields. Losses from wheat streak mosaic virus can be
100 percent, and with no registered chemicals to control the vector, areawide cooperation
is the only way to manage this pest.

To battle new pests, there are efforts to expand areawide
IPM into communities, enlisting citizen scientists to monitor pest movements.
Indeed, Western residents have been called on to participate in areawide monitoring
of emerald ash borer, zebra and quagga mussels, brown marmorated stink bug, Asian citrus psyllid and many more.

I see these successes and efforts as examples of why
areawide IPM is important. Areawide efforts rely on cooperation between
neighbors – whether those neighbors are next door or in the next state – and result
in an environmentally responsible, economically viable and regional reduction
in pests.

The IPM community in the West
should broaden our response to invasive and endemic pests and proactively
develop areawide IPM solutions. Solutions shouldn’t come because we’ve run into
chemical resistance or regulatory issues, but rather in a proactive effort to slow
resistance and reduce risk. After all, as the safflower and codling moth cases
show, an integrated, areawide response can improve control and reduce pesticide
use.

It’s time to amplify the terms
areawide and areawide integrated pest management, and I think we can do that by
working cooperatively. Working cooperatively means harnessing citizen
scientists to do more than monitor pest movement. Citizens can also be enlisted
to prevent and suppress pests. Working cooperatively also means that natural
resource managers and farmers can step across their borders and co-develop
areawide IPM solutions.

As I mentioned in my
first post, we are creating a theory of change for the Center. On a white
board in my office, I’ve been writing key ideas for that theory of change and the
first word that made it to the board was catalyst.
That’s what I think a regional coordination program should do for areawide IPM
– act as a catalyst.

So what does it mean for the
Center and the region we serve?

It means we will support areawide
IPM ideas, practices and research. It means we will encourage pest managers to
develop, test and use areawide approaches that make managing pests safer and
more economical. It means we will focus on solutions that are novel and can
move beyond borders.

The Western IPM Center supports the development, adoption and evaluation of integrated pest management to benefit the people, environment and economy of the West. From our headquarters in Davis, California, we serve 13 Western states and the Pacific Island territories.